Chocolade

I've come to realize that whenever I am in Europe, my chocolate consumption goes way up. I just had a piece of chocolate after having two servings of chocolate vla (a Dutch pudding-type dessert, which, by the way, is delicious).

In addition to that, the Dutch are famous for their dairy and so my milk consumption (which was nil back at home) and cheese consumption (which was also close to nil) has gotten infinitely larger. Now I'm just waiting for my stomach to follow suit.

Will all the biking be able to balance it out? Probably not.


In other news, I went to Leiden this past Lord's day because once a month, all the saints in Holland have a blending meeting together. In total there are probably around 150 or so people, which reminded me of home :). The young people came back from Poland in the morning, so we all had breakfast together, and then had a big Lord's table and there was sharing from Poland afterwards. One of the things that I was most impressed with was the usefulness of the young people here. A few of the sisters were able to translate both Dutch to English and English to Dutch (which is impressive; usually people translate to their native tongue only) and one of them translated from French to Dutch. I felt a little sad in my monolingualness. Now I'm starting to lean more and more towards taking a Dutch course, even though the course is 416 euros and that's a hefty percentage of a monthly paycheque. I think it will be worth it.

There was also a cool example that I had never seen, with mugs and water and coffee and stuff. I can't explain it well (plus illustrations are meant to be seen, not described) so you'll have to find someone who went and ask them to show you.


I also finally got one of the missing puzzle pieces in the stay-in-Holland mission... my BSN number (which is redundant, since the N stands for nummer...)! Which means I can open a bank account! Hooray!

And now I don't have hoard as many coins (the train station ticketing machines only accept coins or debit, and sometimes you don't have 8 euros worth of coins in your wallet...). Happy days :)